(Chart source: Maddow Blog)

Most animals in shelters will be euthanized.
Most of them were someone's pet, a family member, simply dumped or abandoned,
many left at High Kill Shelters. By the time you read this,
many will have been euthanized.

If you're considering a furry
family members, please consider shelters and rescues first.

Contribute what you can to
local shelters and rescue groups to save lives. Maybe it's TIME, a precious
commodity. Or maybe it's $5. It matters.

Support Spay & Neuter
programs to reduce this tragedy! We have much work to do.

This was difficult to decipher......

***EUTHANASIA LIST for 11-1-13 The following dogs are scheduled for euthanasia at 6am if they do not have a FIRM commitment in place. DO NOT comment on the dogs picture to pull. YOU MUST use the contact link to send in your information including the A#. Most of these dogs are long timers at the shelter. PLEASE HELP SHARE! All the pictures will be moved to the ELIST album.

This girl was found with cactus thorns in her mouth and muzzle. Shelter removed as best they can but it would be best if she was seen by a vet to make sure it's all out and that there is no infection. Bea

DUPLICATE PHOTO - This DOG - ID#A148294 Status: STRAY WAIT INJURED - HAS CACTUS THORNS IN HER MUZZLE AND BODY Due Out Date: 10/28/2013 I am a female, black and brown Rottweiler.

It’s an all too typical comparison for the NRA and their representatives to claim that restrictions on guns are similar to the conditions of segregation or racial discrimination.

Nugent called Parks his “hero” for exercising her First Amendment rights and referenced his celebrity as a guitar player to write, “I’m Rosa Parks with a Gibson” but I’m thinking he may have been referring to actor Mel Gibson, who is another intolerant asshole, and not the Gibson Guitar. Just a hunch.

Shitty Pants Nugent said, “Heavily armed with whatever media bully pulpit I can muster, I exercise my First Amendment rights like my hero Rosa Parks who refused to sit at the back of the bus when that numb-nut law existed. I’m Rosa Parks with a Gibson.”

Rosa Parks is best known for not giving up her seat at the front on a segregated bus.

Media Matters reports, “She was honored by Congress in 1999 as the “first lady of civil rights” and the “mother of the freedom movement” and was a 1996 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

Ms. Parks and Shitty Pants have absolutely nothing in common. In fact, he would probably be waving his Confederate flag in her face, while hurling racial slurs with reckless abandon because that’s the kind of asshole he is.

If Ms. Parks were alive today, he wouldn’t be good enough to clean her seat on the bus.

Letting Congress & Wall Street review NSA policies laughable

It is weird to entrust the same policy-makers who were caught lying publicly on the record to Congress in an internal review of NSA programs. As laughable as Wall Street banks regulating themselves, geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser told RT.

RT:Let’s listen to what General Alexander said defending the NSA policies. “It is much more important for this country that we defend this nation and take the beatings than it is to give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked.” He’s got a good point, hasn’t he?Eric Draitser: Well, to some degree that’s true, but again, we have to remember that bureaucrats at that level of the US government, they are masters of distortion and ambiguous statements. But that should be noted that some of the arguments that have been made by Alexander and others are actually valid just not in the way they think they are.
Yes, it’s true these things are for military purposes and for intelligence gathering and all of these things - that is absolutely true. But at the end goal, it is for the purposes of wielding this information as a weapon against political competition, against geopolitical rivals. So when we see the United States and its economic power waning, the United States are even on the ground of military power becoming ever more impotent and so we see an exponential increase in the attention to information gathering, intelligence gathering in order to be able to use it as yet another weapon of dominance and coercion.

RT:What do you make, of this latest development with the EU officials going to demand an explanation why the NSA was spying on us and now that has been revealed more leaks thanks to Snowden. But actually these intelligence agencies from European countries weren’t colluding with the NSA?ED: That’s absolutely right. This is all political posturing, it’s all for the photo that can be sent back to their home countries to say that they are actually doing something about this, when you are pointing out we have known the collaboration - and I think probably collaboration is not even strong enough a word for what they have been doing.
They have been an intimate part of the US intelligence apparatus, and this apparatus extends across all NATO counties, this extends across all other satellites and client-states and other countries that are dependent on the United States in one form or another. If you exist within the US sphere of influence, then you are part of this espionage, you are part of this surveillance, you are part of the system that has been created to further US dominance and hegemony as the policy-makers have understood now for the last few decades. At the very least the US power in decline can only be stemmed by new and improved ways of exercising hegemony. The NSA program is an integral part of that.RT:But are the things going to change? The NSA programs are going to be reviewed by White House, the NSA bill is going to be in Congress. Do you have any faith anything actually will change?ED: No, of course not, because this is a weird way to entrust the same bureaucrats as Clapper and others who have been caught lying publicly on the record to Congress and to other policy-makers and officials about the nature of these programs, about what the United States has been doing, about its very operations in the most public sense of the word. And so we are to entrust these people a kind of an internal review? That’s laughable! It is just as laughable as Wall Street banks regulating themselves. http://rt.com/op-edge/congress-review-nsa-policies-laughable-025/

"After sea kayaking after BP's spill happened, I was sitting at my desk and started coughing up loads of blood," Frizzell, an avid outdoorsman, told Al Jazeera. "My doctor ran a scope down to the top of my lungs and said my bronchi were full of blood."

Frizzell's medical records bear out that he was exposed to toxic chemicals, and he is far from alone.

Since the spill began in April 2010, Al Jazeera has interviewed hundreds of coastal residents, fishermen, and oil cleanup workers whose medical records, like Frizzell's, document toxic chemical exposure that they blame on BP's oil and the toxic chemical dispersants the oil giant used on the spill.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention lists the toxic components commonly found in chemicals in crude oil, and several of these chemicals have been found in the blood of people living in the impact zone of BP's disaster.

Several toxicologists agree, and now one accuses both BP and the US Environmental Protection Agency of knowingly placing people in harm's way since they both had prior knowledge of the harmful effects of the oil and dispersants."BP told the public that Corexit was 'as harmless as Dawn dishwashing liquid'," Dr Susan Shaw, of the State University of New York, told Al Jazeera. "But BP and the EPA clearly knew about the toxicity of the Corexit dispersants long before this spill."
Shaw, a toxicologist in the university's School of Public Health, has been studying the health effects of chemical exposure for 30 years. She is also the president and founder of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, and explained that BP's Material Safety Data Sheets for Corexit warned that the dispersant posed high and immediate human health hazards.

"Five of the Corexit ingredients are linked to cancer, 33 are associated with skin irritation from rashes to burns, 33 are linked to eye irritation, 11 are or are suspected of being potential respiratory toxins or irritants, and 10 are suspected kidney toxins," she added. "BP's own testing found that workers were exposed to a possible human carcinogen from the dispersant.

"We predicted with certainty the widespread human health crisis we are seeing in the Gulf today," Shaw said.Hazardous to Human Health
A newly published study conducted by doctors at Houston's University Cancer and Diagnostic Centers and reported in the American Journal of Medicine, sheds more light on the potential health repercussions for the more than 170,000 people who worked in some capacity to clean up the 2010 disaster.

Their blood tests suggest an elevated health risk for Gulf spill cleanup workers. The study shows that people hired to clean up Gulf of Mexico beaches and marshes during the 2010 oil spill have significantly altered blood profiles that, just as Shaw and other toxicologists warned, put them at increased risk of developing liver cancer, leukemia and other disorders.

"People in the Gulf were exposed to massive amounts of crude oil and Corexit dispersants, both of which contain multiple toxic chemicals, including volatile organic compounds and carcinogens that are hazardous to human health," said Shaw, who served on the Department of Interior's Strategic Sciences Working Group - a team of 14 scientists charged with assessing consequences of the oil spill and recommending policy actions in the Gulf.

"The combination of crude oil and Corexit is exponentially more toxic than either alone, since they contain many ingredients that target the same organs in the body."

"It's pretty clear to me, after spending a year in the Gulf coastal communities during 2010 and 2011, that the suite of illnesses that developed during this time were above and beyond the background level of illnesses incurred in the Gulf," Ott said.

"People across four states expressed concern that these headache-dizziness-nausea-respiratory problems-blood disorders-skin lesions were different than anything they'd experienced before, and far more intense."

Ott said that people she is seeing along the roughly 900km impact zone are all consistently describing these same symptoms of exposure to chemicals in the oil and dispersants.

Skin lesions like this have become common in the impact zone of BP's 2010 oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo: Erika Blumenfeld / Al Jazeera)"Medical literature supports that these are the symptoms, and I would expect to see increased rates of early term miscarriages for women, early developmental issues for children born to women who were exposed to breathing these fumes and vapours, and also continuing chemical hypersensitivity."

Unfortunately, what Ott describes is precisely what many Gulf residents are experiencing.
"We're seeing spontaneous miscarriages, and cancer is rampant," Trisha Springstead, a nurse of 36 years in Crystal River, Florida, told Al Jazeera. "These are occurring in Orange Beach, Alabama, and all over Mississippi and Alabama…women are not carrying to term."

Dean Blanchard, owner of Dean Blanchard Seafood in Grand Isle, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera he knows many fishermen who participated in the oil clean-up operation who have since died.

"I've never seen anything like this in my life," Blanchard said. "I know more than half a dozen guys who were totally healthy before the spill who worked on the clean up. They found out they got cancer and within one or two months were dead."

Dr. Wilma Subra, a McArthur Fellow Genius Award-winning toxicologist in New Iberia, Louisiana, has tested the blood of BP clean-up workers and residents.

"Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and hexane are volatile organic chemicals that are present in the BP crude oil," Dr. Subra recently explained to Al Jazeera. "Exposure has been prolonged enough to create long-term effects, such as liver damage, kidney damage, and damage to the nervous system. So the presence of these chemicals in the blood indicates exposure."Ongoing Problems

According to Dr. Shaw, thousands of people in the Gulf - clean-up workers, fishermen, residents - have now reported multiple severe symptoms related to chemical exposure from the spill.

"What ties them together as a group is their spill-related health problems, which are also typical of the health problems reported from previous oil spills," she said. "Some of these include: blood in urine, heart palpitations, kidney damage, liver damage, migraines, multiple chemical sensitivity, neurological damage, memory loss, rapid weight loss, respiratory system damage, skin lesions, muscle spasms, seizures, and temporary paralysis."

Frizzell is experiencing many of these symptoms.

"I have neuropathy, my lungs are destroyed, I can't feel my feet and legs at times," he explained. "I still have skin lesions come up. How crazy is that that, out of nowhere, your lungs just explode. The day after I was exposed I soaked two full-sized bath towels with coughing up blood. That's an indication of how much blood I was losing."

Crude oil contains hundreds of toxic and carcinogenic ingredients, including volatile benzene and polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Benzene, a principal component of oil, is a human carcinogen that causes nerve damage, leukemia and other haematological cancers."I have neuropathy, my lungs are destroyed, I can't feel my feet and legs at times," he explained. "I still have skin lesions come up.

How crazy is that that, out of nowhere, your lungs just explode. The day after I was exposed I soaked two full-sized bath towels with coughing up blood. That's an indication of how much blood I was losing."Official Response

Al Jazeera asked Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal what his state was doing to safeguard people against chemical poisoning.

In an earlier statement to Al Jazeera, Jindal's office said: "Coastal residents and response workers will be compensated through the deal reached between the Plaintiff Steering Committee and BP. BP must follow through on making whole [properly compensating] impacted residents and workers who experienced or are still experiencing health impacts as a result of the spill."

At time of publishing, Al Jazeera continues to await an updated response from Jindal's office.

Testimony in the second phase of the BP trial has just come to a close, and the penalty phase against BP has now begun, which is likely to take months. Litigators expect many of the personal claims filed against the oil giant to continue to take years.

Under a settlement with BP, clean-up workers are entitled to some medical payments for certain ailments that they can prove were tied to the spill-related work and their exposure.

BP stressed that workers received safety training and personal protective equipment in coordination with government safety agencies.Denying Toxicity

"Based on extensive monitoring conducted by BP and the federal agencies, response worker and or public exposures to dispersants were well below levels that would pose a health or safety concern," the company said.

"To deny the toxicity, BP deliberately put 170,000 workers in harm's way," Dr Shaw said of BP's response. "BP told clean-up crews on the boats not to wear respirators because it made them look bad to reporters. A proper protective response would have been hazmat-style suits for anyone coming in contact with Corexit and oil."

Joe Yerkes was a Florida fisherman who joined BP's oil clean-up programme because he was put out of work by the spill. When he tried to return to fishing after the clean-up, he quickly became so sick he was unable to continue.

He became violently ill, began bleeding from his nose and ears, and began vomiting blood. When Yerkes couldn't get well, he had his blood tested and found it contained high levels of chemicals which his physician attributed to BP's oil disaster.

Following the advice of his attending physician, Yerkes was forced to move away from the Gulf.

"I have spent the last three years literally trying to survive," Yerkes, who now must use a cane to walk and regularly gives himself intravenous treatments, told Al Jazeera. "I have chronic headaches, a fever, and suffer chronic unbearable pain in my muscles and joints, and have had chemical pneumonia twice so far."

Dr. Ott is critical of how the US federal government has reacted to the health crisis.

"It is irresponsible at best, and disingenuous at worst for the federal government to pretend that people can be exposed to these chemicals and not connect the dots between these illnesses and what made them sick," she said.

Dr. Ott is particularly troubled because she has seen all this before.

For years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, she watched as her friends suffered from the same symptoms of chemical exposure she sees today in the Gulf of Mexico.

"I saw many of them adjust to living being chemically ill, then on the other end of the spectrum, unfortunately, I've lost a lot of friends through this - because some people just died," she added.
Dr. Ott explained that chemical illness is a debilitating condition, and believes that now in BP's impact zone, chemical illness is neither being diagnosed nor treated.

She concluded: "In the Gulf, there is a blanket denial that this is happening at all."

A federal judge has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to set a deadline to finish long-stalled regulations on the disposal of coal ash, the waste product that comes from burning coal for power.

A 2011 study found that coal ash rules would create 28,000 jobs in addition to saving lives.

But the regulations have been stalled for four years. After the EPA submitted draft rules to the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2009 and received possible alternative, weaker options for regulation, the EPA has taken no action.

Currently, regulation is left up to the states, which Lisa Evans, Senior Administrative Counsel at Earthjustice said in an August email to Climate Progress, leads to “a patchwork of programs, with many states imposing few, and sometimes, no, regulatory safeguards.”

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a memorandum Tuesday directing the EPA to set a deadline within the next 60 days. This came as a result of an Earthjustice-led lawsuit, filed last year to force the EPA to make progress on coal ash regulation.

Democrats in North Dakota are seeking legislation that would make it mandatory for the state to report all oil and other hazardous spills and leaks to the public, regardless of their size.

The announcement of the legislation comes less than a week after an AP investigation discovered nearly 300 oil spills and 750 “oil field incidents” had gone unreported to the public since January 2012. It also comes just a few weeks after a 20,000-barrel pipeline spill in a North Dakota field — a spill that was discovered by a farmer, not the pipeline company or government regulators. It took North Dakota officials nearly two weeks to announce the spill’s existence to the public.

Right now, regulators in North Dakota aren’t required to make information about oil spills public.

Companies must notify the state of all spills, but the state is under no obligation to then notify the public of the spills. It’s usually only if the spill is a threat to public safety or the environment that it is disclosed to the public. That isn’t uncommon among oil-producing states: Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas also aren’t required to disclose oil spills, according to the AP.

North Dakota’s Health Department is beginning to test a website that would make information about spills public, but the AP reports that the department is “considering how large a spill should trigger a public announcement.” With the new legislation, all spills would be reported, no matter their size.

“When a 20,000 barrel oil spill goes undisclosed to North Dakotans for well over a week — and only then after being reported on by the media — that is a failure,” said North Dakota House Minority Leader Kenton Onstad of Parshall, one of the lawmakers pushing for the legislation.

State Sen. Connie Triplett is leading the group of lawmakers, who are beginning to draft legislation on the issue to be brought before the state’s Energy Transmission and Development Committee. If the legislation passes that committee, it will move on to the full state Legislature during the 2015 session.

Could this Dutch town be the first in Europe to divest from fossil fuels?

A woman holds up a placard during an anti-fracking protest march against the energy company Cuadrilla on August 18, 2013 in Balcombe, UK.

CREDIT: Randi Sokoloff

At a Fossil Free Europe tour event in Amsterdam on Tuesday, two aldermen from Boxtel, Netherlands announced that their town would be divesting from the 200 fossil fuel companies that hold the largest coal, oil, and gas reserves. This makes Boxtel the first municipality in Europe to make a commitment to divest from fossil fuels, joining over 20 U.S. towns and cities that have vowed similar commitments.

Boxtel was the first town in the Netherlands to ban fracking, an initiative that has spread to over 100 cities and towns across the country. In September, the Netherlands put a ban on fracking for 18 months until further research has been done.

According to Fossil Free, in December Boxtel will be holding a conference with municipalities across the country urging them to also “go fossil free” and dump their coal, oil and gas holdings.

What are they hiding? Massachussetts Attorney General Martha Coakley voiced no objection to REPEAL THE CASINO DEAL until....she hired Doug Rubin, Governor Slot Barns Patrick's sidekick to manage her next failed campaign.Martha 'NEVER PUT ANYTHING IN WRITING' Coakley remained silent when it was KNOWN that PLAINRIDGE conducted an ILLEGAL RAFFLE for YEARS.

Sticky Fingers Piontkowski dips into the till, everyone knows about it....does Martha investigate? What are they hiding? The Massachusetts Gambling Commission holds a PUBLIC HEARING, declares itself exempt from OPEN MEETING LAWS, posts the PUBLIC HEARING NOTICE the same day, WRONG LOCATION......successfully preventing public participation.....HOW MUCH WILL MARTHA COAKLEY SWEEP UNDER THE RUG?

First question an attorney asked 'Why isn't an investigation taking place into Piontkowski's $$$$?' Who is Martha protecting? What is Martha covering up? Why isn't Martha even doing the job she was hired to do?

The Gambling Vultures flaunt their 'Host Community Agreements,' and where's the Massachusetts Gambling Commission?

When a nation allows its poorest citizens to go without food, yet refuses to close tax loopholes or end Welfare for the Wealthy, that defines OUR Moral Bankruptcy. Is that what you support? Is that how you define your Christian Values?

Feed the Hungry:

More than 47 million Americans who receive food stamps will see their benefits cut starting Friday. Sen. Bernie Sanders said the “incomprehensible” cuts will “have a horrendous impact” and send more people to volunteer food banks that already are overwhelmed. A family of four receiving food stamps will get $36 less a month when the program intended to help people weather the recession runs out at midnight.

The cutoff comes as Senate and House negotiators are working to resolve differences in competing versions of a farm bill that funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As the recession’s impact has lingered, 1 in 7 Americans are now on food stamps. The numbers have gone up as the economy has struggled to recover from the worst recession since the 1930s. Sanders was among 20 senators to sign a letter urging colleagues on to prevent “harmful cuts” and avoid putting up new barriers to participation in the program.... Listen to the interview here: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/video-audio/food-stamps-103113 Read the letter here: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/download/farm-bill-letter?inline=scribdSee More